Meredith would set up camp - and camera - every August, and each film featured Jack Whale as the main, shambolic character.

In 1936, Meredith teamed up with locals Reverend H E Hughes and Richard Elis Jones to produce Gwylliaid Cochion Mawddwy (Bandits of Mawddwy) - a retelling of a legend about bandits in the hills around Llanymawddwy.

Megan Huggins, the granddaughter of Richard Elis Jones, said: “I think the digitising is a wonderful way of widening access not just to the story of the bandits and early film-making by amateurs, but to the locality of Mawddwy and the people who lived and worked there.

“I have two great-grandfathers, a great-uncle, grandfather, grandmother, uncle and mother featuring in the film, and it’s a powerful emotion to see them, their changing expressions and movement - so different to a still photograph.

“In my family alone, there are descendants in Arizona and Australia who will be able to see their forebears on film.”

A scene from Gwylliaid Cochion Mawddwy (Image: BFI)

Robin Baker, head curator of the BFI National Archive, said: “These films offer an unrivalled record of our rural heritage in all its richness across the 20th century.

“It’s an immersive experience to watch them, and often deeply moving.

“People who live and work in the countryside will be fascinated to see how their forbears used to live.

“Like many other city dwellers, I was born and bred in the countryside, and this collection of films offers all of us an extraordinary and very real social history of the British countryside.

“It’s a very potent portrait of an often neglected cornerstone of our national life.”

Other films released show archive footage of the Royal Welsh Show at Rhyl in 1958 and a film about Wales called the Land of Song, which was made in 1960.

The films in Rural Life date from 1900 to 1999 and are drawn from the collections of the BFI National Archive and the UK’s Regional and National Film Archives, with content spanning the whole of the UK.